Hi everyone! I was invited to speak at George Fox University’s chapel at the beginning of April, and I wanted to share the 19 minute video with you all. It was a fun trip, filled with lots of opportunities to speak God’s truth for women!

Welcome to the third installment of Feminist Friday! Today’s topic is second wave feminism. The revolutionary nature of second wave feminism is what many think of when they characterize the entire movement as “those crazy feminists” – so we’re bound to have some fun!

This post is a short synopsis (not a thorough education), and it’s meant to help us better understand this word that we throw around so often in Christian debates about a “woman’s place”. So please check out why we are writing about feminism, and be open to some good discussion!

Christians don’t know very much about feminism. It’s one of our “knowledge blind spots”. This wouldn’t necessarily be a bad thing, except that today we find ourselves in the middle of a 35 year-long debate on what the Bible says about a “woman’s place”. And for a group of people who hate when we ourselves are misrepresented in the media, we sure make a lot of public claims about this topic that we know so little about.

In my own journey, I became a Christian and an egalitarian before I had even grown into a woman. I didn’t learn about feminism until I was in graduate school. And, if I’m honest, I did so begrudgingly.

The term “feminist” gets thrown around a lot in the Christian debate about “a woman’s place”. Having been involved in this debate on the Christian blogosphere for the last year and a half, I have noticed that while many like to talk about feminism, it seems that very few actually know much about it. In fact, I’m not sure any word is more misunderstood and misused in evangelicalism today than “feminist.”

Last year I taught a college course on Women in Politics where we spent 4 weeks going over the history of the women’s movement. We also evaluated egalitarian theology, and the stories of women who were personally touched by feminism. This seemed to help my students understand the power dynamics between men and women in society and have more educated discussions on the topic in class, so I thought it might be of help to others as well.

On February 14, 2015 The Junia Project partnered with Neighborhood Christian Fellowship, Azusa Pacific Seminary, The Wesleyan Church, The Free Methodist Church of Southern California, and The Friends Center at APS to host Celebrating Women in Leadership. It was a wonderful morning with over 200 people in attendance! Check out the full Photo Gallery! Our […]

They’re just not my thing. For the most part, I don’t like attending them, I don’t like being in them, and I don’t like planning for a hypothetical one that may or may not be in my future. My aversion to weddings stems from my annoyance with the commercialism tied to it, the financial burden placed on family and friends who participate, the focus on the wedding instead of the marriage, and the abundance of patriarchal symbolism intertwined in various parts of the ceremony.

As you can tell, I have strong opinions on the matter, so when The Junia Project admin team talked about writing about weddings for Valentine’s Day, I thought that instead of pushing my opinions on all of you, instead I’d ask you for your thoughts on these very issues. I am very happy with the result, and am encouraged at the varying opinions within egalitarianism. So, without further ado, I give you…

The claim that the Church is “too feminine” has come around again recently, from both the Evangelical and Catholic camps, and it makes my skin crawl. It instantly hits my annoyance button for the same reason that the misuse of language irks me – it shows that we aren’t thinking things through before we say them.

2014 has been an incredible year! We have absolutely loved spending this last year with you all, and we hope to spend many more together! Today we are sharing a few highlights – the ten most viewed posts written in 2014, our favorite posts of the year, and some things we are looking forward to in 2015. […]

Happy December to all of you! It really is beginning to look a lot like Christmas. I live very close to my city’s little main street area, and across the street from my apartment is a lot that stays empty most of the year. When December comes around, not only does the main street get decorated, […]

Thank you to everyone who participated in the first ever Junia Project blog contest! Our panel of four was honored to read your entries and we are so thankful for all who took the time to write! Choosing category winners was very difficult because there were so many incredible submissions. In fact, every entry we received had great value that was worth sharing, making it hard to pick only 3 to feature on the blog …so we selected 5 winners and 10 runners up!

Each winner will receive a copy of Lynne Hybel’s “Nice Girls Don’t Change the World” and their winning entries will appear on The Junia Project blog this fall.

We would also like to feature the blog entries written by the runners up. We will be asking the authors for their permission, so be looking for those in the coming weeks!

If you are at all like me, you sometimes get overwhelmed with the amount of books that people recommend to you. I have two stacks of books sitting on my bookshelves right now that are going to take me a little while longer to get through. And although I love to read, sometimes you just need something different. So, to make up for last week’s Summer Links in which we recommended more reading material on the topic of Women in Church Leadership, this week I am sharing a few video messages on the topic.

This week’s Summer Links is all about resources! One of the things that keeps surfacing in our blog discussions is the need for more teaching about women in the bible. So today here are some books from our personal bookshelves and a couple of internet resources to help meet that need. Hopefully you’ll enjoy them as much as we have!

Oh, and don’t forget to enter the Junia Project Blog Contest which ends Monday, August 25!

Last week Owen Strachan, prominent complementarian leader and President of the Council for Biblical Manhood and Womanhood, called Rachel Held Evans‘ teaching “heresy” because she used a female pronoun to describe God in one of her posts. Oh, and he did it over Twitter, so naturally a series of Twitter conversations ensued. I personally love Twitter, […]